Hi Stefan,

It occurs to me that it would be nice to remove the recursion in this example. My thinking was that I should be able to utilize xfa.resolveNodes() and the proper SOM expression to get a nodelist of all the fields. I haven’t been able to concoct the right SOM expression however. I thought “xfa.form..#field[*]” should work after all:

The .. notation indicates a recursive search through the children of an object.

The # notation allows you to access a note by type.

The [*] notation returns all the occurrences that match.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t work. Any idea why?

Rob,

It took me a little while to figure-out what was going on with the FormCalc double-dot (“..”) operator.

While documentation on the subject may lead one to think that it’s a recursive operator or that recursion is possible with it, the operator isn’t designed to be recursive.

The double-dot “..” operator is specific to FormCalc and is designed to perform a top-to-bottom, depth-first search of the RHS (right hand side) operand looking for a single object which matches the RHS. Once that object is found, if the RHS is augmented with the “[*]” syntax to locate all occurrences of an object, it looks for all occurrences only within the container which was found to contain the first match.

Consider the following simplified object hierarchy:

R
+-- A
    +-- C
    +-- C
+-- B
    +-- C
    +-- C

Searching for “R..C” would return the first C from the top which is parented to A.

Searching for “R..C[*]” would return the first two Cs from the top, both parented to A, but none of the Cs parented to B.

Steve,

I can see why you would want to use my sample as a base to work with.

I would suggest that you first modify the “ProcessAllFields” function in the “ScriptObject” script object such that it calls a new function named “ProcessExclusionGroup” for every exclusion group that it finds as it recursively iterates through the XFA Object Model. At the moment, the “ProcessAllFields” function will call the “ProcessRadioButton” function for every radio button within an exclusion group which means you’ll end-up verifying the same exclusion group many times.

Once you have the “ProcessExclusionGroup” function in place, then you can loop through the nodes it contains to find the radio buttons in the same way that the “ProcessAllFields” function does, simply looking for nodes with a “field” class name (since you know they’ll be radio buttons at this point).

Also, given the exclusion group, you can get its rawValue property which will tell you the value of the selected radio button. Since the correct answer has a radio button with a value of 1, if the exclusion group’s rawValue is 0, you know the student didn’t select the correct answer. You can then loop through the radio buttons, highlighting the incorrect selection in red and setting the exclusion group’s rawValue property to 1 (which will automatically select the radio button with the correct answer).

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Newbie,

Based on your question, it sounds like you’ve already figured-out how to highlight all the required fields when the user clicks the Submit button. Now you’re just wanting the empty required fields to be highlighted instead of all of them, correct?

In that case, you should be able to tweak your script to ignore fields which have a value. You can determine if a field has a value by performing the following test on a field object reference (“MyField”):

// JavaScript:
if (MyField.rawValue =! null && MyField.rawValue.length > 0)
    // the field has a value

// FormCalc:
if (HasValue(MyField)) then
    // the field has a value
endif

suchita,

I understand your problem. Off the top of my head, I can think of two alternatives to modifying the content area border (the one that’s for the value area, modified by the Appearance property in the Object palette’s Field tab):

The first would be to modify the entire field’s fill color rather than its content area. In this case, you would simply pass the field object to the SetColor method (rather than passing “oField.ui.resolveNode(“…”)” and then use the “fillColor” property as I describe in my post on setting a field’s fill color.

The second would be to highlight the field’s caption rather than highlighting its value. To do this, you would simply pass the field object to the SetColor method (as in my first suggestion) but the SetColor method would change to this:

function SetColor(oField, sColor, bRemove)
{
    oField.caption.font.weight = bRemove ? "" : "bold"; // bold when highlighted, regular otherwise
    oField.caption.font.fill.color.value = sColor;
}

And the calls to the SetColor function would all change to this:

SetColor(oField, sColor, bRemove);

You’ll also need to change the “non-highlight” color, specified as white (255, 255, 255) in the “HighlightRequiredFields(oNode, bApply)” function, to black (0, 0, 0) or else your captions will all disappear when the highlight is removed. Of course, this assumes that all your captions are black (or at least the same color).

Antonio Auricchio,

This is probably occurring because the “ProcessAllFields” function is recursive. Recursive functions can require a lot of memory, especially if they recurse very deep. Since you’re using it on a large form (with lots of fields and subforms, I presume), it’s no surprise that you’re seeing increased memory consumption in Acrobat.

The function is recursive because it drills down into every “container” (i.e. subform, exclusion group, group, etc.) that might contain other form objects or containers. An alternative, I suppose, would be to use a stacking algorithm using the Array object to avoid the recursive function call but I have no idea whether that would help with Acrobat’s memory consumption or not.

Hi Stefan –

I’m trying to customize your “Process All Fields” script to validate only VISIBLE fields on the form, instead of all fields, prior to submitting.

I have a fairly large form and am using subforms and their presence property to hide or show groups of fields based on user interaction. If they are visible, they are mandatory. Since I have no way of knowing which fields will be visible at runtime, I have to make them all “User Entered – Required”. Your script works like a charm for my application EXCEPT when fields are wrapped in a subform and the subform presence property is set to “invisible”. Your script still flags the non-filled mandatory fields even though they are not displayed or visible on the form.

I have a function that returns false if the field (the input to this function) or any of its parents is not visible:

function isVisible(oFld)
{
var bVis = true;
var nxtFld = oFld;
while(nxtFld.name != “form”)
{
if(nxtFld.presence != “visible”)
{
bVis = false;
break;
}
nxtFld = nxtFld.parent;
}
return bVis;
}

Trouble is, I don’t know how to integrate the function into your script to achieve the “visible fields only” result. Can you suggest a good approach?

Stefan,

I am using your script object and it is working great. The only problem i am having is its not picking up required text fields when they are within a table. It picks up dropdowns and radio buttons but just not a text field or a datatime field. These are also dynamic tables there you can add and delete rows.

First I’ve got the same problems like Mark (its not picking up required text fields when they are within a table), but I could fix this issue. Your field inside the table must have something like a underline, invert or outline (object palette), then the script also with tables works well.

Hi Stefan, I have a couple of fields and radio buttons to user required and although the other fields were highlighted, the radio buttons were not. Would you know the solution to this?

Hi Stefan,

I am trying to understand Highlighting script. What I am trying to do with my form is when you select text from a drop down it automatically highlights certain text boxes throughout the form. For example: When you select the month of December in the drop down, it will highlight the weekend days which are (text boxes) below.

I can’t seem to figure this one out.

Thanks

Hi Stefan,

You are performing nullTest in your form. Is it also possible to perform formatTest and scriptTest using javascript?

Thanks
Ram

Hi Stefan,

Hope everything okay at your end…

Just want to ask your help. I need to validate and check two date fields which entered by usersr using the calendar picker. The required date must be greater than the requested date. I hope you can help me…

Thank you and best regards,
Sandra

I was hoping to obtain an example of how Antonio Auricchio (or anyone else) was able to address the memory issue when dealing with a large number of fields.

Any help would be most appreciated.

@Ben,

You don’t see the warning on my form because I do the validation manually using my “Process All Fields” script (from this tutorial). That means all the fields are actually flagged as “optional”, getting rid of the warning — which can’t be customized, unfortunately.